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Space Truckin'

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One of the central tenets of the Pegwars universe is that the future is not so dissimilar to what we are familiar with now.   Spaceships are not outlandish things, they are merely futuristic cars.  Most are low-cost, practical and plain people-movers, most people just need transportation and will pay the lowest amount they can get away with for a vehicle that ticks the right boxes. Some spaceships are enthusiasts' vehicles - sportships, where the fun of flying them outweighs the practicalities or the cost.  Modded ships.   Ships with cusom paintjobs.   Ships that should never have had spaceturbos installed but do.  Ships that are loved and adored by their owners. And similar to future cars, businesses must truck on as well. Space trucks are the evolution into space of ordinary trucks - long distance haulers, flown by truckers and contractors.  A big powerful cab owned by a trucker, behind which cargo and trailers can be towed. There was an awesome game called I-War 2   that h

Atmosphere Rendering, part 2

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Still doing work on my Atmosphere Shader, however it's proven to be quite the resource hog! The current implementation is a fairly typical screen-space shader.  It ray-traces the light from the sun through the atmosphere until it hits the current pixel fragment, calculating the sun transmittance along this ray.  Then it marches that ray towards the camera, blending it over the background performing in and out-scattering again until it reaches the final fragment colour. Incorporating Mie and Rayleigh scattering in the ray-tracing gives the following results : Adding the clouds into the mix (as a prototype) gives results with I think outstanding potential.  However the added number of calculations in the shader pretty much takes it to breaking point, so much that I can't even prototype what it will finally look like, because I have to reduce the number of ray-marching steps in the shader.   Put simply, the shader is brute-force ray-tracing with no real optimisat